Large fields of data centers soon to be established in Normandy? This is the desire displayed by Hervé Morin during his wishes to the press, Tuesday January 7. The president of the regional council hopes to develop a new sector of excellence in the region.
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Will Normandy become the number 1 region for hosting data centers in France? In any case, this is the wish revealed by Hervé Morin, president of the regional council, during his wishes to the press, Tuesday January 7.
Data centers are sort of large, very secure and air-conditioned hangars which house servers, routers, hard drives, responsible for processing and storing data.
“We have been contacted by companies twice in 2024 about the possibility of setting up data centers representing investments often worth several billion euros.s”, reveals the Norman elected official. In the end, no deal was sealed but it led to a flattering finding for Normandy.
We found that we had a gigantic comparative advantage. Firstly, we still have a little space, and secondly, above all, we have something which is a mine which is carbon-free electricity.
Hervé Morin, president of the Normandy Regional Council
And the regional president cited the recent commissioning of Flamanville, the connection of the offshore wind farms of Fécamp and Courseulles, and the Raz Blanchard tidal farm as an additional source of “green” electricity. Hervé Morin supports him: Normandy becomes “THE great region of carbon-free energy in France and Europe“.
Data centers require considerable electrical power to operate, particularly because of the cooling systems they require. According to the International Energy Agency, they consume 2% of the world's electricity. HelloCarbo believes that data centers are responsible for 0.3% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Telecommunications companies and their subcontractors are therefore interested in the energy power of Normandy. The regional council therefore intends not to snub a sector of the future. “We are in the process of building a turnkey proposal which will allow Normandy to position itself not only to host data centers but also behind that, to be able to produce an ecosystem to agglomerate research centers, laboratories, partnerships with engineering schools”, ultimately, to create jobs.
So the political will is to “create poles capable of generating value, wealth and specializing the regional economy in a field which we can clearly see is immense”.
According to Hervé Morin, four to five locations in Normandy have already been identified as potential data center hosts. “Microsoft announced yesterday 80 billion (dollars) of investment on the subject, we must be able to tell an investor wanting to carry this out, that Normandy is one of the places in France, in Europe where we can have such investments“.
Currently, Normandy already hosts around fifteen data centers, mainly established by the companies WebAxys, Covage and DataOuest, but also by Orange or SFR. They are found near large towns such as Caen, Rouen, Le Havre and Alençon, medium-sized towns such as Val-de-Reuil, Lisieux and Saint-Lô, or in the countryside such as Venon (27) or Saint-Senier-de -Beuvron (50).
